


meet me in the margins

by captainkilly



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: M/M, lots of literature references here, lots of swearing in this one boys and girls, the rest of H Company is background noise, the way to Leckie's heart is through books
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-02
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:55:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25040494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainkilly/pseuds/captainkilly
Summary: He should’ve known the man better, but Leckie’s slowly beginning to realize he doesn’t know Hoosier very well at all.
Relationships: Robert Leckie/Bill "Hoosier" Smith
Comments: 20
Kudos: 55





	meet me in the margins

**Author's Note:**

> Ahh, I am supernervous about publishing this one! There is a whole collection of literature quotes in here, all sources mentioned in-text, as I somehow came to the conclusion that it'd be a whole lot of fun if Hoosier could meet Leckie's well-read self on very, very equal ground..

* * *

“Without a sign, his sword the brave man draws, and asks no omen, but his country's cause.”

_The Iliad_ is a good companion to bring to a gunfight, or so he presumes when the men around him go still a moment. They are quieter than Leckie’s ever heard them be, so quiet that it seems for a moment as though this part of the ship knows only ghosts.

As always, it’s Hoosier who breathes life back into the void.

His quick hand, demanding the lifeline that’s a pack of smokes, breaks the spell. Snaps it clean in half with all the practical air of a man who doesn’t quite hold with lofty poetry. In the hours, days, weeks he’s known Hoosier, this is one of many truths he’s learned about him. (He rather thinks there are a lot of lies that Hoosier tells him, too, and perhaps this is yet another one of those.)

Leckie can’t help the broad smile that crosses his face as he looks up at the man.

There’s a spell in that too, somewhere, he muses, as Hoosier’s gaze softens only a fraction before hardening again. Something that flows with the tide that carried them all the way toward an island none of them can pronounce the name of. There’s a ripple in the brightness of Hoosier’s eyes that feels too much like the threat of an undertow.

Leckie blinks. Shakes his head. Follows the set of Hoosier’s shoulders until Chuckler lets out a belch that could curdle milk.

Another spell broken, with no guarantees of return.

_Forgive us, for we know not what we do._

He bites the inside of his cheek.

* * *

“Surren–”

Leckie raises an eyebrow. This is not the start of a word he thinks Hoosier would ever know, let alone utter in the midst of battle. After all, the man who builds walls around himself is not fashioned for anything that yields to another. He thinks Hoosier might not be equipped to deal with white flags or arms held up high. Leckie might not have known the man that long a time, but he knows the type.

“Surrender..”

What. The. Fuck.

He might not know the type after all. Decides to check to be sure.

“Huh?” he yells back. “What did you say?”

“I said,” Hoosier hollers over the sound of the world falling apart around them, “now you must surrender to the gods!”

Leckie blinks at the reply. Frowns at the quietening treeline. “Are you getting religious on me now?” he asks, not certain if he’s going to like the answer. Hoosier and religion rather seem to fit together like reds and greens: always vaguely reminiscent of passive-aggressive family holiday traditions. “Didn’t pick you as the type!”

Hoosier has the audacity to roll his eyes. The man crouches down next to him, eyes never leaving the treeline before them, and huffs out a breath. They’re hip to hip now, joined, hands never straying far from their triggers, and if Hoosier’s breath wavers at the closeness or Leckie’s breath hitches at the touch they will not say a word about it to the other. Leckie supposes there is a certainty in that, even when the man beside him makes him feel all kinds of off-kilter.

“Your mind is still obsessed with deeds of war.” Hoosier’s voice is so low amid the chaos that Leckie barely catches the syllables that linger in the air between them. His accent’s wrapped around them so slowly that every other word feels like a tender caress. Leckie’s finger leaves the trigger only a moment to accommodate the shiver that runs down his spine. “But now you must surrender to the gods.”

Hoosier’s hand grasps his shoulder all too briefly. He takes off running in the next breath, shouting down Chuckler at the other end about being low on ammo. Leckie blinks. Moves his leg away from the grim Marine that takes Hoosier’s place beside him.

His fingers curl around the trigger once more.

“The Odyssey?” he asks the trees.

“The Odyssey?” he asks the bullets.

“The fucking _Odyssey_?!” he roars, and war answers him.

* * *

He doesn’t know why he keeps composing letters.

_Dear Vera,_ he’ll start, _I have read more books in the past week than I did in the month before I enlisted. Nobody ever tells you how war is mostly about waiting. Does home feel like waiting, too, or is it part of a war I will never understand?_

_Dear Vera,_ he will scribble onto a piece of paper too small to carry weight, _we are corrupting the young with every passing moment of this war. Sid, you remember Sid? Sid tried some Jap wine and we sang happy birthday to him as though he will live to see another year._

_Dear Vera,_ he’ll continue, _Runner’s shivering more than that small dog the Millers from down the street own. I’m a little concerned over how hot his skin feels to the touch, though Chuckler clucks at me when I worry and tells me that water will cure all ailments. I don’t tell him that I know we’re surrounded by an ocean and there is no reprieve in its depths._

_Dear Vera,_ he falters, at last, _dearest Vera. I would tell you about Hoosier if I could find the words._

* * *

“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”

Hoosier frowns down at him. “Dreaming about your lady friend again?” A pause. A slow, rather too predatory blink. “Budge.”

Leckie snorts out a laugh that hurts his chest. Scoots back on the cot until his back hits something sturdy. He draws his knees up and wraps his arms around his legs. Makes himself small in the space that Hoosier just invaded with long limbs and the soft rattle of dogtags settling back against a bare chest. The man looks like the sun’s rays have taken up residence beneath his skin sometime overnight. Leckie squints and rubs his eyes.

“ _Anna Karenina_ ,” he offers, trying to look at Hoosier without really seeing him. “The quote.”

“Russian.”

“Yes.”

There is a brief pause that could mean nothing or everything at all.

“I rather liked Kitty,” says Hoosier, then, sounding decisive and defensive all at once. “She was only eighteen. Shouldn’t have had to put up with all that nonsense of being put on a pedestal by some guy who doesn’t even dare speak with her.”

“Levin did marry her.” Leckie shrugs as he says it, even though he is internally screaming bloody murder at Hoosier’s admission. “Whatever else there is about that story, his shyness didn’t impede that part.”

“Didn’t impede it? Didn’t impede –” Hoosier’s jaw sets into the stubbornness he usually reserves for an outright argument. “How in the _fuck_ didn’t that impede their entire relationship, Leckie?”

“Well, it did, at first.”

“You’re goddamn right.” Hoosier points at him rather sagely. “I’d argue it never fucking _left_ the relationship, but you wouldn’t know a damn thing about that.”

Leckie inhales sharply. “And you would?”

Hoosier looks him up and down. “Yeah. I see it plain as day.”

He shifts on the cot until his foot brushes the side of Hoosier’s thigh. He doesn’t dare laugh at his own predicament, not when this laughter could sound so much like it could come at another’s expense, but he shakes his head all the same.

He’s arguing about Russian literature with _Hoosier_ on an island in the middle of fuck-all nowhere. He fights the urge to scream.

“Could I interest you in something else?” he asks instead. His fingers curl around _The Idiot_ the second he actually reaches out toward his accumulated pile of books. “Dostoevsky, maybe?”

“Bless you.” _No._

“You could give it a go.” _Fuck you, Hoosier._

“It won’t be as good as Anna Karenina and you know it.”

Leckie’s jaw drops. He soundlessly mouths the words _not as good_ to himself. Decides to take offense when Hoosier’s smile turns as radiant as the sun.

“Now you listen here you –”

* * *

Hoosier, he discovers to his dismay, writes in the margins of the books he’s given.

_The Grapes of Wrath_ is one of the few books Leckie somehow didn’t get round to reading until he is trapped on another island feeling quite fucking sorry for himself. He almost closes it again when he sees the pencil-streaks across paragraphs, the indents on the paper margins, the exclamation marks and the derision that could only really belong to Hoosier sprawled across the many pages.

He is two hundred pages in by now and he still doesn’t know if his fellow soldier loved it or hated it.

“Fucking hell,” he curses, squinting at another crossed-out section in the book. Sometimes, he thinks Hoosier took personal offense to some passages about the countryside. “I’m going to kill you when I get back to you.”

He doesn’t actually kill Hoosier, but he drops _For Whom The Bell Tolls_ into the bleary-eyed man’s lap and sneers a “Death was a friend, and sleep was Death's brother” that sounds a little too vicious by far. He tries not to register the disappointed look Chuckler shoots him, or the wary tilt to Runner’s head as the smaller man glances back and forth between Leckie and Hoosier.

“I take it you liked the notes I left you,” grins Hoosier.

“I hated your notes. Read that book instead.”

He’s been smart, or so he thinks. Hasn’t written anything in the margins of the first thirty pages. The book’s such a goddamn chore that he wouldn’t be surprised if Hoosier stops at page twenty-nine.

He should’ve known the man better, but Leckie’s slowly beginning to realize he doesn’t know Hoosier very well at all.

“Let us sleep," he said,” drawls Hoosier’s voice against his ear one night soon after, “and he felt the long light body, warm against him, comforting against him.” Hoosier’s accent is a soft purr that lodges itself between sinews and arteries, bone and skin. Leckie shivers in the heat of the pacific nightmare that beat the sanity out of both of them a long time ago. The languid, drawn-out tones set goosebumps upon his flesh as Hoosier finishes the quote Leckie highlighted in that too-long too-dull book. “Abolishing loneliness against him, magically, by a simple touching of flanks, of shoulders and of feet, making an alliance against death with him.”

“Did you like the note I left you?” he dares ask, now that Hoosier’s chest is against his back and the man’s nose brushes against the curls at the nape of his neck. “Or are you here to complain about it the way you did when I dared mention _Treasure Island_?”

Hoosier’s answering chuckle turns Leckie’s daring into a liquid, fluid thing that slips through his veins with a thrumming noise that could make his heart falter.

Days later, it very nearly stutters to a halt altogether.

* * *

_Leckie,_

_If you dare claim I wrote to you from beyond the grave, I swear I will haunt you for the rest of your sorry-ass life. I hope Runner and Chuckler are keeping well. Hope you are with them, wherever the fuck that is._

_I’m breathing. That’s as good as I can give you. My body remembers how to, and I’m rolling along with that motion rather nicely. There are days on which it hurts. ~~Not as bad as leav–~~ I guess the body knows a lot. _

_Lucky, if the body were not the soul.._

_H_

* * *

_Hoos,_

_What is the soul?_

_\- Peaches_

* * *

_Cheeky bastard,_

_I knew Whitman was in that bookcase of yours somewhere. Can probably even quote your favorite line from that one. _

_I celebrate myself, and sing myself._

_Let me know if I’m getting too close._

_H_

* * *

_You need to tell me how in the hell a sorry sap like yourself got his hands on Whitman in rural Indiana._

_Also, you’re close but so far away. ~~Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.~~_

_I’m more partial to Dante, myself._

* * *

He tells himself it does him no good to wander out to the mailbox every day. Twice a day. Twice at night, too, when he can’t sleep and the world around him seems to cave in on itself like a soggy cardbox box left out in the rain too long.

He tells himself all this, but he still walks up to it and checks its contents as though he hasn’t just fucked this whole damn thing up beyond repair.

A month passes like this. Then another.

He wanders out into the golden sunlight one morning to find the world changed.

There is a lump of brown paper sticking out of the mailbox. It’s far too big to fit into a mailbox that’s always been just a little bit on the side of small. (Just like the rest of the Leckie household has always been too small for life, really, though he would never even dare speak this into the cramped space where his bedroom used to be.) The package is too haphazardly wrapped to belong to anyone else in his family. The Leckies like their things neat, after all. Like their _people_ neat, too.

Hoosier is a lot of things, but _neat_ probably never will be one of them.

He unwraps the package while standing on his lawn in his bathrobe, hair askew and eyes squinting against the morning light, and doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“Emma?” he muses, fingers tracing the faded letters on the spine of the book. He shakes his head. Doesn’t comprehend what could possibly lead one soldier to leave Jane Austen in the possession of another. “You’d better have left me a note.”

* * *

_“I cannot make speeches, Emma,” he soon resumed; and in a tone of such sincere, decided, intelligible tenderness as was tolerably convincing. “_ _If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am. You hear nothing but truth from me.”_

There is an address.

An Indiana address.

He is halfway out the door before he remembers he’s still in his bathrobe.

* * *

“You’re a pretentious little shit, you know that?”

The fair-haired man raises his eyebrows at the greeting. Leckie can already feel a grin threaten to claim the sides of his mouth, but he fights against the urge. Fights a losing battle, it seems, just as every other battle waged against Hoosier is one he slumps his shoulders against in defeat.

He smiles.

“How’s that, Peaches?” asks the man, and smiles back in that conspiratorial way of his. “I merely sent you some light reading.”

“Fuck you.”

“I rather wish you would.”

Leckie’s up the porch’s steps before he knows good and well what his legs are doing. He doesn’t know what the fuck has gotten into him. He just knows that he needs to claim that self-satisfied smirk that tugs at the left corner of Hoosier’s mouth. He knows he needs to crowd himself up against the man’s skin until a part of that warmth he seeks finally comes to claim him in turn. He knows these things, and he doesn’t understand them at all.

“The things you don’t know could fill a book,” warns Hoosier, as if he can read minds, when Leckie steps so close that he can inhale the Midwesterner’s scent. Perhaps he’s always been able to read them and Leckie’s just that side of enchanted that has decided not to care. “Lucky. Leckie. _Robert_.”

“Shut the fuck up, _William_.”

He surges forward with the same headlong abandon with which he flung himself off a boat and into hell. Hoosier, damn him, because _of course_ Hoosier is just as tired of waiting for the other shoe to drop, meets his mouth before he can land.

“You shut up,” breathes the man against his lips, licking away Leckie’s rising protest with a too-deft too-curled too- _ohfuckmesogood_ flick of his tongue. Leckie’s lips are buzzing with the same hum that settles somewhere at the base of his spine. “Can you do that, hm?”

He nods, breathless, wordless, as Hoosier crowds into his space and breathes light back into his lungs. Long fingers tangle in his curls and he steps forward, closer, closer, closest, to find purchase in the sun’s rays that streak just below Hoosier’s collarbone. His lips greet skin so greedily that a huff of breath stutters against his brow, hands still in his hair, thighs open to allow him further closeness still. He gasps as the man’s mouth brushes the skin below his ear.

Hip to hip, joined, he curls his hands around Hoosier’s neck. Holds him as close as the gun he hasn’t stopped cradling in his mind since.. since.. _since_. Holds him closer than he dares, and kisses him twice as deep to know how drowning feels.

Robert Leckie finally figures out he didn’t know how to read until Hoosier’s holy, _goddamned_ mouth licks, moans, scrapes, bites, traces, breathes all kinds of poetry into the curve of his spine.


End file.
